The Brains Of Psychopaths
Psychologist Kent A. Kiehl discovered that psychopaths’ brains differ from ours. People who lack empathy and remorse have a poorly developed amygdala - a brain structure, which is responsible for our emotions.
Kiehl’s biography is also interesting. He was born in Tacoma, near the place where Bundy lived. In childhood, Kiehl could not understand how such a monster could grow up in their “sleepy suburbs for the middle class.” He decided to study such personalities, graduated from college and even met a legendary Robert Hare, who developed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
Soon Kiehl began conducting his own research in a high security hospital for the most dangerous criminals in Canada. Worked without days off, spent hours chatting with rapists, murderers, scanning their brains with EEG. He wanted to scan the brain of psychopaths with a computer tomograph, which, of course, was not in prison. But he was in a local hospital.
Kiehl talked to both administrations - prison and local hospital and asked permission to conduct his research. It’s hard to believe, but in 5 years he scanned 50 brains of psychopaths-prisoners. With all the precautions they were brought to the local hospital, they were handcuffed and put into a tomograph. They performed different tasks, and then they were taken back to prison.
As a result, the Canadian scientist found out, and subsequently proved on a larger sample, that psychopaths have a poorly developed amygdala. Such people understand what is “bad” and what is “good”, but they simply do not care. Signs of psychopathic behavior can be observed in childhood. Some of them cut cats, some kill bird. Of course, not all animals torturers will become psychopaths, but most psychopaths abused animals. There are other symptoms…
An old lady complains about her 8-year-old granddaughter “I decided to spend a weekend with her. We went shopping, came back, and I found a stolen toy in her bag. Of course, I punished her. She did not say anything, did not make excuses, she only looked at me as if I was her worst enemy. And after a while her mother called…she was crying and telling me a lot of bad things. She told me I was an awful grandma, because I abuse the little girl. As it turned out later, my granddaughter called her mother and lied that I was beating her because of her awful handwriting.”
Dr. Kiehl is sure that punishing a little psychopath is useless. The kid will only act as if he understood a lesson. What actually happens is that he becomes mad because he was caught on a lie and improves his skills, learns how to lie better. However, sometimes, positive reinforcement can work. There was a study with 300 juvenile delinquents. 6 psychologists applied behavioral technique known as positive reinforcement. Three years later, independent experts were provided with the results of this study, and they concluded that 36% of the participants stopped committing crimes. While, according to the usual statistics, only 2% of teens become law abiding citizens.
